Traveling the metro in Naples often brings riders in touch with artwork, many by local artists, but rarely will a world famous artist contribute their work.

However, a few months ago, President of Campania Ita Vincenzo De Luca accompanied by EAV (rail transport) President Umberto De Gregorio, along with world-famous sculptor Anish Kapoor, gathered at Monte Sant’Angelo metro station in Naples to celebrate Kapoor’s two sculptures now surrounding the subway entrance and exit.

Sir Anish Kapoor is a famous British-Indian sculptor, born in India in 1954 to a Punjabi Hindu father and an Iraqi-Jewish mother. Kapoor is famous for his use of abstract biomorphic forms and use of rich colors and polished surfaces. He was the first living artist to be given a solo show at Royal Academy of Arts in London, and his work can be seen in many countries today.

In 2003, Anish Kapoor was invited to create artwork at a Naples metro station for the city’s new underground system that would be part of the urban and cultural regeneration of the Traiano district, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Naples. Work began on the sculptures right away, but between preparing the terrain and Kapoor’s travel schedule, it would take the next two decades to complete.

The station is a remarkable symbiosis of sculpture and architecture, a dynamic that has always been a central force in Kapoor’s work. From his earliest pigment works that rose from the floor to his monumental public works such as Cloud Gate (a.k.a. The Bean) in Chicago, Kapoor’s work both holds and creates the new space in which it is experienced.

At Monte Sant’Angelo station, three integral themes of Kapoor’s practice have coalesced in more potent form than ever: the mythological object, the body and the void. The sculpture at the university entrance to the station is made from weathering steel and swells up from the ground, appearing to offer a descent into the underworld as much as an entrance to a train station.

“In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground,” said Kapoor.

The Traiano entrance presents the inverse to this absorbing descent; here, its aperture in steel is rendered smooth, tubular, rim-like and clean. As in so much of Kapoor’s work, interior space is turned inside out; he reverses upwards and downwards in a sculptural work that is not an object in the landscape but rather is joined, rooted and part of the landscape.

Anish Kapoor’s unique topography of continuous and undistinguished interior and exterior has been adhered to within the station, as well, where working with Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete from Future Systems, tunnel walls remain rough and elemental, keeping a singular integrity to the entirety of the work.